DePOT postdoc and student affiliates Anna Bettini (University of Calgary) and Manuela Vinai (University of Turin) are co-convening a panel on deindustrialization at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meeting next summer (July 2024) in Barcelona, Spain. The call for papers opened today and will close on January 22, 2024.
The panel that Manuela and Anna are convening is titled: Deindustrialization: Exploring the un/doing of an anthropological concept (P230). They invite papers that deepen our understanding of deindustrialization’s role in issues like climate change, energy transition, and socio-economic inequalities.
Short abstract: The concept of deindustrialization provides a global perspective, fostering dialogue across political, economic, and environmental realms in anthropology. We invite papers to deepen the understand of its role in issues like climate change, energy transition, and socio-economic inequalities.
Long abstract: In recent decades, deindustrialization has attracted growing attention from scholars in the social sciences. Generally framed through the lens of the decline of manufacturing sectors, mainly in the Global North, deindustrialization conflates a wider set of issues related to the global industrial restructuring, financialization, the changing international division of labour and the emergence of new industrial economies. The perception of decline within the transformation of “western” economies is thus the other side of the coin of a more complex phenomenon that has profoundly reshaped the global political economy between the 20th and 21st centuries (Pike 2020). As such, deindustrialization has been approached from different perspectives, focusing on the metamorphosis of working-class cultures and political identities (Dudley 1994), the fate of ruined industrial landscapes and the socio-environmental problems investing abandoned industrial wastelands (Strangleman 2013). The panel aims at broadening the scope of debates on deindustrialization, seeking to read the un/doing of industrial worlds in a global perspective, fostering the dialogue between political, economic and environmental perspectives. The aim is to strengthen our grasp of deindustrialization to bring more understanding on pressing issues such as climate change, energy transition, racial and socio-economic inequalities.
This panel invites papers that critically interrogate the multiple forms and meanings of deindustrialization, its social and political entanglements, and temporal and environmental dimensions. We aim to provide innovative insights to elevate the discourse within anthropology, emphasizing its distinct depth and breadth compared to other disciplines and opening up new perspectives on the interplay between regional and global transformations.
Follow the links above to submit a paper to EASA.
